Is Al Franken Trailing by Just Two Votes?

The AP puts Norm Coleman's lead at 2 votes, causing Allahpundit and Kathryn Lopez, among others, to despair. There may be good reason to be anxious, if not desperate, but not because of the AP count. Tomorrow morning the AP will show Franken rapidly pulling away with the lead--but this number is bunk because the state has not allocated thousands of challenged ballots withdrawn by Franken or Coleman. As Nate Silver wrote yesterday, Franken did reasonably well as the canvassing board, comprised of four judges and the secretary of state, reviewed his pile of 400 total challenged ballots, but

we don't know anything about the nature of the thousands of challenges that Franken withdrew. The state does not appear to have added the withdrawn challenges back into its totals; in fact, it does not appear to have done anything with them. We don't know, among other things, how many of these withdrawn challenges were made to Coleman votes (in which case, Coleman will now get credit for them) as opposed to nonvotes (in which case, they're basically irrelevant).

The board is now sifting through a much larger pile Coleman challenges--approximately 1,000 ballots, including 400 frivolous challenges that the campaign withdrew too late to be removed from the packets of ballots sent to the board. Once all of the withdrawn ballots are added to the totals, the race should tighten up. Nate Silver's (caveat-laden) projection puts Coleman up by one vote after the board reviews the challenged ballots. But here's the reason to despair, er, worry: the Star-Tribune readers project that Franken will ultimately pull ahead by 40 votes once all of the challenge ballots have been reviewed. Readers are able to view and vote on all of the challenged ballots, and they have a very good track record of voting the same way as the canvassing board, with two exceptions.Readers get the decision wrong when an oval is perfectly filled-in for one candidate, but a disqualifying identifying mark--name, initials, phone number, etc.--is somewhere on the ballot. Second, the board is generally (though not always) ruling that when an X-mark is placed over a filled-in oval, that it signifies the voter did not want to vote for this candidate. Readers often see the X as a mark of emphasis rather than "obliteration." Could the readers have given Franken 40 more votes than the board will? I'd like to say you betcha, but I really have no idea. The other big news out of Minnesota is that, in a 3-2 decision, the Minnesota supreme court ruled that the secretary of state, county officials, and the Coleman and Franken campaigns must agree to implement a procedure to identify and count absentee ballots that were wrongly rejected. This ruling overturned the canvassing board's decision that counties could resubmit their vote totals without establishing a statewide standard. The Franken camp is "pleased" the votes will be counted, and the Coleman campaign is " quite happy" with the decision because it requires some uniform process agreed upon by both campaigns. Nate Silver has written that Franken stands to gain approximately 25 to 100 votes if these improperly rejected ballots are counted (perhaps he now thinks that number is bigger since the estimated number of wrongly rejected ballots has grown to 1,600). But Silver's projection is based on a late October poll that showed absentee voters favored Franken by 3 points more than the general electorate did. The poll had an unreliably small sample of 95 absentee voters. You read that right: 95. As Philip Klein, noted earlier this week, "it's always the team that's behind that wants to expand the universe of ballots and the winning side that wants to freeze them in place." Are there more rejected ballots from military voters and the elderly than college students and ex-pats? We just don't know. Oh, and if you think this recount is already hopelessly in the weeds, Silver notes: "Pretty much everything that has happened so far, and everything that happens from here on out, can and quite possibly will be the subject of a court challenge. "But other than that, we've got it all figured out..."